Cracking few days!!

 The first three days of this week have been really good. The period started well when Kev had a session at Belvide on Monday. With only a small number of nets open he managed to ring 35 new birds, of which 13 Blackcaps and another Cetti's warbler were the highlights.

While setting the nets for this morning on Tuesday evening Paul ringed another 8 new birds.

As usual, we had been watching the weather forecasts avidly with respect to this morning as it was clear that some really windy and wet conditions were on their way--but when? To be fair the forecasters got it pretty well spot on this morning--after a pre-dawn start, we kept a close eye on the rain radar and decided at 8.40 to wrap up. Although we were sorry to finish so early, it turned out to be exactly the correct decision as steady rain started as we walked back to the cars.

Even though it was a truncated session, such was the movement of birds that we ringed 104 new birds. Most of which -again-were migrant warblers. Blackcaps are building momentum with 42 ringed this morning, and strangely Willow warblers outnumbered Chiffchaffs, by 11 to 3. It's looking as though we will have a record year for Willow Warblers.

Without question the star bird of the morning was this season's first ( and probably only) Grasshopper Warbler.. As you can see from the picture, these are not especially stunning looking birds but they are tricky to see in the field because of their skulking behaviour..

This picture shows most of the salient features--short wings, mottled back, head and shoulders, and a quite long rounded tail. The very heavy wear on the tail and wings on this bird show it is an adult.

We also caught yet another Kingfisher--there is a family party neat the ringing site, and this time we caught a juvenile male.

Although there is a suggestion of a tinge of red on the lower mandible we are inclined to call this bird a male, as the juvenile females we have caught have much more obvious red on the lower mandibles. The ageing feature I wanted to show on this bird is the 'greeny-blue' colour of the wings compared to the 'bluey-green' colour of the adult wing in my previous Kingfisher picture

Just like bonfire night !!

 This was how team member Sam described his night sleeping in one of the hides while a series of violent thunderstorms crashed all around.!! Fortunately they petered out and gave way to a beautifully calm morning. Quite often meteorological events like last night 'stir things up a bit' after some settled weather and birds often decide to move. That obviously happened last night as there were many more birds around this morning than for the past few days. Also our ringing session produced fewer re-traps compared to new birds than recently demonstrating an influx of migrant birds.

Of 104 new birds caught 90 were migrant warblers with a surge in Reed Warblers to 22, Sedge and Blackcaps were both on 19, but very unusually Willow Warblers on 11 outnumbered Chiffchaffs on 8.Another 3 Garden warblers and 4 each of Common and Lesser Whitethroat are bringing several warbler species near to record numbers for Belvide. Bring them on!!

 

What a 'Start' !!

 The weather forecast this week suggest that we need to get sessions in when we can. So with this in mind when I woke up around 6 am to still, dull conditions I decided to have a try at Belvide. I opened only 3 nets as the wind was starting to increase but within a couple of minutes our newest net site  produced its very first bird--and what a start it was. To be precise it was our first Redstart of the year--and if previous years are anything to go by it will probably be our last.

This picture shows the key features of a juvenile male Common Redstart. The name red'start' comes from the old English name for a backside/tail which is this lovely orange-red colour. These birds accentuate this feature every time they perch by quivering the tail in a very characteristic way.

We can sex the bird as a male by the dark head and throat and the richness of the orange breast and belly.

I've closed in on the throat and breast to illustrate a feature of this and several other species. During the winter period the birds don't need their bright colours as they are not setting up territories or trying to attract a mate. SO-you can see that the colours are muted by having lighter/buffy tips to all the coloured feathers. These tips gradually wear off during the winter and hey presto! the richer colour further down the feathers are exposed just in time for the breeding season WITHOUT the high energy need to grow another set of feathers--how cool is that!!

Lots of learning

 The wind yesterday was unhelpfully from the north and we feared a poor catch--but managed a reasonable 66 new birds--as usual composed mostly of migrant warblers again.

Now that most of the team are very familiar with these species we can spend a little more time examining the birds in a bit more detail and showing our visitors some aspects they have probably never seen before. Here are a few random pictures of the kind of insights we were able to pass on:-

First up was a kingfisher. Always a crowdpleaser anyway, this turned out to be an adult male. It was a male because the lower mandible was all black ( females have an orange patch). There were three clear adult features. Overall the wing is bluey rather than greeny in a juvenile; second the legs and feet are all orange with no dark patches--finally and crucially, as you can see in the picture, the flight feathers were being moulted--you can see a secondary feather regrowing in this picture and there was a primary feather also being moulted on each wing.

Next up was a Blackcap--which at first sight looked like an adult male with a complete black cap. However, on close examination you can see the tiny remnants of brown juvenile feathers. This was obviously from a very early brood and has already moulted most of its cap feathers.

Juvenile Robins always cause confusion. This was a very recently fledged bird--so why no red on the breast? The general consensus is that while the young birds still need some help from their parents, they have brown breast feathers so as not to elicit aggression especially from the adult male--it's dad! Over the coming weeks this bird will replace these brown feathers with red ones--at which point the parents will force it away from the territory.

Lastly here is a shot of the crown feathers of two Sedge Warblers:-

The upper bird is an adult, the lower a juvenile. Adults Sedge Warbler heads are darker, with less obvious cream eye stripes ( supercilia), and hardly any cream streaks in the crown feathers themselves. Juvenile heads show the opposite features.  

 

 

A bit of a struggle

The story of the season so far is the stop/go nature of the migration pattern. On Tuesday birds had been moving but that had largely stopped when we arrived on site yesterday. However, when we finished around 10am it was a pleasant surprise to find that we had ringed 69 new birds--again mostly warblers of the range we normally get.

We did ring 4 juvenile Reed Buntings which had clearly bred on the reserve, and here is a picture of the tail of one bird showing a couple of interesting features:-

We often see quite a bit of other wildlife on the reserve and this beast of a caterpillar walked calmly through the ringing site :-I've mentioned previously that the quality and shape of juvenile feathers helps in ageing many songbirds-and here is a prime example. Most of these feathers are very pointed-juvenile feature--but the central two are more rounded at the tip--these are adult type feathers which this bird has already moulted in. Secondly you can see small holes in the feathers -most juvenile feathers are not as robust as adult ones and any slight change in the quality of food is often reflected in weaknesses in feathers

A quick check on Google identified it as an Alder Moth caterpillar-superb.

That's more like it !!

We decided to alter our strategy a bit this week because it looked quite windy on Wednesday while Tuesday and Thursday looked good for ringing. 

So --Wednesday's session at Belvide is postponed and will now take place on Thursday

The change of plan has so far proved entirely vindicated after we had a superb morning of ringing today. It was clear from the first visit to the nets that there had been some migration overnight--and the thick cloud cover which came in early morning had caused some birds to drop down to rest, feed and wait for better conditions.

We ended the morning having caught around 150 birds of which 126 were new birds. Not only that but 107 were migrant warblers. The spread of species was very encouraging. With 24 birds, Sedge Warblers continued being the most common migrant at Belvide--closely followed by Chiffchaff with 22 ringed. At 14 Blackcaps are increasing but we think there are many more to come. The most interesting species for us were Willow Warblers with 16 newly ringed, Common Whitethroat and Garden Warblers with 7 each, and Lesser Whitethroat with 5 ringed.

We are all looking forward to Thursday to see what the weather brings--more about that on Thursday  

It's all a bit odd

We have now moved into August and typically we would expect migration to start to warm up--especially with a change to better weather over the last few days. So it was a bit of a disappointment on Saturday morning with absolutely perfect conditions that we struggled to a modest total.

The recent pattern of rather more Sedge Warblers that Reed Warblers continued but only one Blackcap was a real puzzle.

However, there were a couple of silver linings. First I think I have mentioned previously how exciting it is when we ring Lesser Whitethroat. We only caught one on Saturday, but we also caught a few Common Whitethroats which gave us the opportunity of showing a picture of the two to show how different they look in the field. These are both juvenile birds with the Common on the left:-

You can see how much greyer the Lesser Whitethroat is, as well as showing a kind of highwayman's mask through the eyes--with the Common wing showing lots more chestnut.

Whenever we take a bird out of a net which has already got a ring on there's a bit of a frisson of excitement. Every now and then the excitement level is raised when we spot something unusual written on the ring--as we see here on an adult Sedge Warbler:-

In the middle you can just make out the letters PAR--because this is a bird ringed in France--PAR..IS. This is great, but what is even better is the history of this bird. A female, she was first ringed as a juvenile on her first migration south at Finistere in France on 4th August 2018. ( Note how early this bird had set off --presumably from somewhere in England). On 10th July 2019, we caught the bird at Belvide, where we assume she was breeding. And now on 2nd August 2020 we have caught her again at Belvide. Again we assume she was breeding here but she must have been nesting at the other end of the reserve or else we would have expected to have caught her earlier. We released her to get on her way--Bon Voyage!!

Sunday morning saw Kevin and son Gareth operating at their racecourse site where they had a good catch of over 40 new birds, including 26 migrants of which 7 were Blackcaps--obviously not as elusive as those at Belvide!. They also ringed 7 House Sparrows-although a very familiar species we don't ring so many like this one....

Finally, Ron sent me another picture of the Swifts from last week--this one shows an even better view of the throat pouch rammed with insects ready to take back and feed to the chicks